One of our favorites on the trip — spicy cumin lamb hand-pulled noodles from Xian Famous Foods ($6) on East Broadway. SO delicious. This place is cash only and has standing space for
4 people at a little counter. This and a coconut cream filled donut could be my last meal on earth.

Good morning from behind someone’s fence in Reamstown. We slept 4 hours and hit the road within 10 minutes before anyone could kick us out.
Leaving Reamstown. We couldn’t believe this was the last day!

Kramer Mill Road

Ducks turning at all the same time. They are more organized than chickens.

Small village of Bowmansville 8 or so miles later.

Vagrant lifestyle. Brushing our teeth and freshening up at the Bowmansville baseball park.

What we had left in our bags for breakfast.

Telephone line down somewhere near Geigertown.

Geigertown, just 20 miles or so from Reamstown. We were sleepy and took a power nap outside of the post office.

After napping we rode about 6 miles to the next town of St. Peters — we didn’t expect to run into such a cool little spot.

There are several old quarries around St. Peters for swimming.

Their bakery was really good.

The Pilgrim Turkey on apple-walnut-raisin bread. Best sandwich of the trip.

Apple cheesecake. This was a perfect lunch stop — we had food that was actually really good, beautiful scenery, and some guy was playing digeridoo and other instruments below us. We spent way too long here but it didn’t matter.

This guy played Arkansas Traveler for us.

Okay, back on the bike.

Crossing over the Schuylkill River by Valley Forge National Historic Park.

Schuylkill River Trail, a bike path that didn’t suck. We took this all the way to Conshohoken and wished we could have stayed on it 16 more miles to Philadelphia, but with 90 miles to go we didn’t have any time. We took a break to eat some bread and cookies, biked next to a guy in a really nice vintage Mercedes and chatted for a while, then rode to Amber to get hyped.

We bought energy drinks for the first time and were pretty pumped for the first 25 miles.

Once we got onto Lower Mountain Rd. it started to get dark. All of these tiny residential roads in the hills are heavily shaded and it got pitch black really quick.

This is a sardine sandwich we made once we got to New Hope around 9pm. We still had over 50 miles to go.

Right across the bridge from New Hope is Lambertville, New Jersey. It was already really Jersey Shore.

About to ride all of New Jersey in the dark and we were both tired as hell.

The small, one-lane, tree-covered back roads were some of the spookiest on the trip — perfect place to find a ghost, witch, or serial killer. We rode into spiderwebs all night and heard the craziest sounds. Riding took a long time not just because we were sleep deprived and tired, but the roads were dark and poorly paved. Trying to find the right turnoff in the dark also slowed us down.

Once we only had 20 miles to go we contemplated sleeping next to a bank for a while. We were so sleepy but decided to just go for it.

Summit, New Jersey train station — the official end of the trip according to our Adventure Cycling maps. Tears of joyyyyyyy.

Taking the short train ride from Summit to Penn Station in Manhattan is the easiest way to get to NYC.

Surreal.

We stunk. Being on the train with a bunch of colonged business men felt wrong. The minute we got off the train we were overwhelmed by people and a sense of anonymity.

Our friend Steven (who we did a tour from LA to SF with two years ago), met us at the station and guided us to Brooklyn.

But first we had to stop at Doughnut Plant.

COCONUT CREAM FILLED. Best donut of my life.

Creme Brulee donut.

Donut Butt.

We were kinda homley, very happy. The guys at the Plant hooked us up with some free donuts.

Broken brake hoods and a little spider living in there.

It’s crazy riding in a big city after being in the Kountry.

Williamsburg Bridge.

60 days, 53 days of riding, 4,007 miles (not including getting lost and exploring), a desert, 4 mountain ranges, and a bunch of adventures later… we made it to our friend’s house in Brooklyn with our 80lb bicycles.

We opted not to take the Chesapeake Bay Alternate and stayed mostly on small country roads.

Houcks Mill Road.

At noon we stopped in Jarrettsville for lunch. It was a weird Hawaiian themed ice cream and sandwich place that played songs from the Rugrats soundtrack. Food was really bad and we sat there for almost 2 hours.

7 miles later we stopped to take yet another break at Deer Creek.

Matt took a nap and woke up with a tick on his leg.

Entered Pennsylvania on the 165 after Pylesville!

Amish people.

This part of the road was like all the states put together. Steep hill like the Ozarks, corn from Kansas, barking dogs of Kentucky.

Pennsylvania was hillier than we expected. We had two steep climbs out from the river bottom near York Furnace before reaching Wrightsville and the Susquehanna River.

We also ran into a sweet couple that gave us chocolate chip cookies and offered us to make us burgers for dinner — too bad we had to get moving.

This is all we could see.
Biking in the dark took us forever. We got into Reamstown around 1:30am, ate dinner behind the fire house, then set up our tent between someone’s fence and tree. Didn’t sleep till 2:00am. We are officially squatters!

Today we left Maury and Rebecca’s house in Maryland and biked 7 miles to D.C. to get back on route.

Rock Creek River Trail, pretty at times but it was the worst bike path we’ve encountered. It was poorly signed and extremely confusing with turn offs everywhere twisting every which way. With the heat it took us 4 hours to go just 24 miles. Really. We kept getting lost and frustrated.

Once we got out of bike path mess we found these BBQ pork sandwiches.

The streets were not any better.

Seriously?

Cars.

Frozen custard in Reisterstown. We didn’t know that it was just another name for soft serve, damn.

We decided to stop early in town. The volunteer fire house put us up for the night. Everyone was super fun to talk to. One of the guys told us how he took his fire class with Joaquin Pheonix and that they went to 9 strip clubs together in 3 weeks. He’d hand him $100 bills to give to the girls… I would have pocketed them. “Then John Travolta would walk in looking like an ape.”

Beans and rice. The usual.

We got our own cubicle with bunks! Listened to the county operator all night over the speaker system. “Female, 25, loss of consciousness… Male, 32, suicide…” It kept waking us up. Morbid, but the voice was kind of soothing at the same time.

After riding 18 days straight we were tired and going a bit crazy, so what better place to take a day off than D.C.?

Waiting for the bus from the suburbs
of Maryland to D.C.

Cowgirl Creamery for lunch.

Smithsonian Natural History Museum. It was packed. We tried to go to more places and take advantage of the free admission but we just couldn’t walk very much.

Hope Diamond. Never heard of it until today.

The house we stayed in was so acoustic that making dinner late at night was sort of awkward. We tried our best not to make a bunch of noise. Matt washed the cheese grater with the fancy parmesan inside it still… We couldn’t do anything right!

Ron. He suggested we take Highway 1 to D.C. because it was a more direct route and we’d have more time to explore the city. Against the advice of our maps we decided to brave the traffic and no shoulder and do it.

At least there was shoulder some of the time. No scenery though.

We got up on the sidewalk for a second. Matt wasn’t looking and biked into this block of wood.

After this we got lost. Frustrating day.

Finally on the bike path into D.C. It was so crowded and overwhelming. After riding in the country for so long we realized we hated bike paths.

Going into D.C. with my shirt tucked in funny and dodging runners.

I tried sweet talking the security guards into letting us bring our bikes up to take a picture. Although the answer was no, they picked a few bugs out of my hair. Man I’ve been outside for a long time.

We asked if the president really lived in the White House. “This is the Capitol Building, sir.” Oops. How embarassing.

Awesome bike paths. It’s a trip being in a big city.

White House

Javier and Oscar. We got lost trying to find the bike path to Bethesda, where we were going to stay with a family friend of Matt’s mom. These pedi-bike guys were really cool and helped us with directions. Javier offered us his place but we had already promised to be in Maryland.

We realized we didn’t have to go all the way to Ashland to head up the Atlantic Coast route, and that we could just take the 208 north straight to Fredericksburg and save 50 miles. 30 miles away we ran into a road cyclist named Stan and he invited us to stay at his house in Fredericksburg.

Okay, so he ended up having a lot to say that we didn’t agree with, including: the Muslim religion is evil (and Christianity is somehow perfect), there is no rape in Japan, girls get pregnant as teenagers to be popular, Asians treat life cheaply, hence all the prostitution in Thailand, and poverty has nothing to do with violence in America. All this and more aside he was a very interesting, complex character and we appreciated the sense of camaraderie he held toward us as fellow cyclists. We enjoyed his stories about flying airplanes for a living and cave diving very much.

String cheese (how did she know we love string cheese?!), brownies, Cytomax, and directions to Charlottesville. So much love. We want Phoebe to be our auntie.

PBJ on Ezekiel bread! We had such similar tastes.

Phoebe does incredible work as an investigator for the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law. She offered to take our gear into town since she was going there anyway and we got to have a fun 10 mile birthday ride.

UVA

Dormitory area designed by Thomas Jefferson.

Bagel from Bodo’s.

Raiding free samples at a gourmet market.

I ordered a cake from Abermarle last night. “Umm, can you spell Krusher?”

Phoebe, Lily, and her friend Megan joined us for cake. It was an actual birthday party.

Bye to our new friends 😦

We didn’t leave Charlottesville until 3:30pm, and it was time well spent. After being lost for half an hour we started our 55 mile ride to Mineral.

Matt pretended to grab this old lady on a walk and then she turned around while I was holding the camera. It was hard not to laugh.

Matt playing softball with random people in the countryside.

Got to Mineral’s Volunteer Fire Station around 9 or 9:30pm. We took showers, used their kitchen, and watched music videos on the country channel. The firemen were bagging on each other all night. All we can say is there was some sort of sex act caught on tape and they were trying to find who was who.

We set up tent outside right next to the train tracks — we were so sleepy neither of us woke up once.